MY FAMILY'S DAILY WAR

Parents In Recovery Struggle With Daughter's Fight With Addiction

I am, at the least, a fourth-generation alcoholic. So is my wife,
Deirdre. Our 22-year-old daughter, Carrick, is a recovering heroin addict.

Most members of our family have been successful professionally -
Deirdre's father was an attorney and judge; my side brims with
journalists who kept the proverbial pint flask in their desk drawers.

Most of us got sober, but we've taken different routes to get there.
I've learned along the way that there is a difference between not
using a drug and being in recovery, which encompasses the way you
lead your life, interact with other people and face your mortality.

To greater and lesser degrees, we functioned despite our illnesses,
as many of you or your loved ones do today. More than 22 million of
us older than 12 abuse or are dependent on alcohol or illegal drugs,
according to 2004 government figures, and that's not counting
prescription drug misuse. Sixty-three percent of Americans say that
addiction - their own or another's - has had an impact on their lives.

Compelled to drink

I first swore off booze as a 16-year-old who'd stop off in a saloon
on the way home from high school for a few boilermakers - shots of
bourbon chased by a beer. That period of sobriety lasted a few weeks;
relapse is part of this disease.

I had my last drink two decades ago, when I was 32. My bottom came
when I discovered that the liquor cabinet was dry one evening. With
my toddler tugging on my leg for attention, I felt physically
compelled to buy a bottle of vodka, spiritually driven to stop
letting alcohol control my life and intellectually determined to end
the cycle of waking up with a hangover, nipping at lunch to feel
"normal," imbibing in the evening to get blotto and arising again
with a hangover.

Few of my friends thought I had a problem; most drank as much as I
did. My best buddy from those days, prone to depression and Seagram's
7, killed himself 10 years ago, still drinking.

I did not seek treatment or help from a 12-step program like
Alcoholics Anonymous because I was not comfortable turning over my
life to a "higher power."

Whenever someone asks me how to get sober, however, my first
recommendation is to head to the nearest 12-step meeting. Deirdre
did, and the fellowship she found "in the rooms" was the cornerstone
of her recovery 19 years ago - and counting.

You're always counting, because sobriety is, as the AA slogan goes,
"one day at a time." The reality is that I picked up a lot of the
12-step philosophy by osmosis, and its precepts have helped not only
the millions who join but countless others who are "sick and tired of
being sick and tired."

Every treatment philosophy has its zealots, from 12-steppers to
members of therapeutic communities such as Phoenix House that break
you down in order to build you up. Any of them might work for you.
Some will tell you that their way is the only way. That's true only
to the extent that it's true for them. The bottom line is that many
people overcome their addiction and flourish, but less than 10% of
people who need intensive treatment at a substance-abuse facility
actually receive it in a given year, according to the federal
Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration.

Deirdre and I had our own ideas about what would work for our
daughter, Carrick, who first drank at 12, smoked marijuana at 13,
dabbled in other recreational drugs by 15, became a heroin addict at
17 and met her bottom while speedballing - mixing heroin and cocaine
- - at 19. By that time, she had been through three emergency rooms,
seven detoxes, three short-term residential programs, a four-month
wilderness-therapy program, several 12-step programs and four special
schools and had prematurely quit a long-term treatment community
twice. She had talked to dozens of psychiatrists, psychologists,
social workers, medical doctors and addiction counselors. The deeper
her addiction took hold, the better she got at telling them all what
they wanted to hear.

'Stealing money, sleep, sanity'

After she turned 16, Carrick was often away from home. She recently
recalled that, when she'd visit our suburban New York state home, "I
would come home with a warm greeting, pillage the house and leave
with a warm farewell. It was not just stealing money, but time, sleep
and sanity."

We eventually told Carrick that we would no longer enable her in her
addiction - including providing shelter and food - while she was
using drugs, but we would do anything we humanly could to help her in
her recovery. Some people think that barring our daughter from our
home was heartless. We knew her life was at risk every day she was on
the streets of New York City, but she proved time and again that she
would not confront her recovery as long as we protected her from her
bottom. Nor was it fair to our son, Duncan, five years younger. Or ourselves.

In the end, Carrick decided, on her own, to try methadone
maintenance, a controversial treatment that critics contend
"substitutes one drug for another." It saved our daughter's life. She
is gradually reducing her dosage with the intention of quitting;
others might need to stay on methadone all their lives. Many become
productive members of society, no longer scheming for the next fix.

"You've got to meet addicted individuals on their own terms, rather
than confront them on yours," says Harris B. Stratyner, clinical
division director of Addiction Recovery Services for the Mount Sinai
Medical Center in New York. "The goal is to get people to completely
stop using, but not to say to them, 'You're using, therefore I'm not
going to engage you in treatment.' That's not the way you motivate someone."

Stratyner is a leading proponent of a "carefrontation" model of
treatment, which holds that addicted individuals should not be held
responsible for having their disease any more than diabetics are but
that they must take responsibility for their recoveries. So must the
family and friends who get caught in the vortex of lies and
manipulations that swirl around an addicted person.

Treatment replacing jail

Some say that it's fruitless to force a person into treatment,
particularly a teenager who is still enjoying the dopamine-induced
good feelings that drugs undeniably provide. More than 80% of teens
relapse within a year of treatment, according to one study.

Carrick will tell you, however, that she took away one powerful idea
from the programs she attended and prematurely left: When she was
ready, she could get better. And once she tried, we again did
everything we could to help.

"Without trying to sound melodramatic, giving me another chance
probably saved my life," Carrick says. "The line between enabling and
supporting sometimes requires you to take a risk and hold onto realistic hope."

Call it paternalistic - in my case, it literally was - but addicts
frequently don't know what's best for them, and interventions might
be necessary. When Carrick was living on the streets, we prayed that
she would be arrested and ordered to treatment by a judge. When she
was finally nabbed for theft, however, she was sentenced to 30 days
in jail. She celebrated her release by getting high.

Drug courts around the nation are beginning to substitute treatment
for incarceration for non-violent offenders. About 80% of the more
than 2 million teens in the juvenile-justice system have drug and
alcohol problems, according to figures compiled by the Robert Wood
Johnson Foundation, and a similar percentage have diagnosable mental illnesses.

Depression a factor

Indeed, addicted individuals of all ages who have illnesses such as
bipolar disorder might use mind-altering drugs to self-medicate. We
once begged the admitting doctor at a psychiatric hospital to treat
Carrick's depression. We were devastated when he not only gave us the
party line that Carrick would first have to abstain from drugs, but
also expressed his doubt, based on her record, that she'd be able to do so.

She has, though, and is attending college with the intention of
becoming a fifth-generation journalist. An anti-depressant stabilizes
her mentally; she says she no longer "gets in a crummy mood for no
apparent reason."

In 1998, more than 10 years after she got sober, my wife, Deirdre,
became so deeply depressed and suicidal that I marked her survival
from hour to hour. She eventually signed herself into New York
Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, a psychiatric hospital in White
Plains, N.Y. Her life was saved by electroconvulsive therapy,
anti-depressants and talk therapy. She has gone on to become
accomplished in substance-abuse treatment, working as an intake
coordinator for a unit within Mount Sinai Medical Center. She's a
happy and productive wife, mother and citizen.

We've been able to afford treatment for her and Carrick over the
years, but insurance coverage has been erratic and spotty. We've
broken into retirement accounts and refinanced our mortgage to pay
medical bills.

What's most unfortunate to many addicts and family members is that
the war on drugs has become a polarized battle between two camps:
hardliners whose "zero tolerance" approach relies on interdiction and
prisons and laissez-faire libertarians who think that supply, demand
and individual choice should allow the market to reach its natural level.

The market for mind-altering drugs is lucrative. Drugs are
responsible for the livelihoods, legal and illegal, of millions of
people worldwide - from drug lords to rapid-detox clinicians, from
bartenders to prison guards, from bureaucrats to copywriters. A
recent study by researchers at the University of Connecticut
supported the idea that the more alcohol ads teens see, the more they drink.

Government money for treatment is harder to come by. The Bush
administration's $12.7 billon drug-control budget request for 2007
earmarks 65% for interdiction and law enforcement and barely 35% for
treatment and prevention. A National Center for Addiction and
Substance Abuse report found that, of the $277 that each American
paid on average in state taxes to deal with substance abuse and
addiction in 1998, only $10 went toward treatment and prevention.

There is obvious common ground: People. If we were to focus our
efforts on the family members, friends and neighbors whose brain
chemistry has been altered by drugs and alcohol and treat abuse and
dependency as the public health scourge that it is, we'll have
declared a war on addiction.

It's a campaign that can be won, one life at a time. I've seen it happen.

ABOUT THESE ARTICLES

The articles in today's Lifestyle section about addiction are adapted
from a series "Silent Treatment: Addiction in America." Written by
professional journalists, the series explores the latest research on
addiction treatment and recovery.

These pieces have been funded by a non-profit organization, the
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The foundation, based in Princeton,
N.J., is the nation's largest philanthropy devoted exclusively to
improving health and health care. Any sources in the series receiving
support from the foundation are identified as such. For more
information on the foundation, visit www.rwjf.org.

The series was conceived, produced and coordinated by Public Access
Journalism LLC, an independent media company that examines social
issues for newspaper readers. The company is directed by Jane
McDonnell, a former Knight Ridder/Tribune managing editor and a
journalist with 20 years of experience.

The series was edited and distributed by McClatchy-Tribune
Information Services, which also designed a reprint of the series for
the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and was paid a fee for that
service by Public Access Journalism.

GETTING HELP

Alcoholics Anonymous, www.alcoholics-anonymous.org; local Web site,
www.aamilwaukee.com; 24-hour local hotline, (414) 771-9119.

Narcotics Anonymous, www.na.org; local Web site,
www.wisconsinna.org/MASC.asp; local help line, (866) 913-3837.

Al-Anon/Alateen, www.al-anon.alateen.org; local Web site,
www.area61afg.org. For family, friends of alcoholics.

2-1-1@IMPACT. Call 211 in Milwaukee County or (414) 773-0211 to speak
with a community-resource specialist who can refer you to the appropriate help.

Substance Abuse Treatment Facility Locator,
dasis3.samhsa.gov/Default.aspx, a searchable database of treatment providers.

Silent Treatment: Addiction in America, www.silenttreatment.info.
Comprehensive list of treatment resources throughout the United
States, and other information.

Thom Forbes is an author, blogger on addiction and recovery, and
former reporter for the New York Daily News.